McCartney’s personal sexuality

ETA: I used to wonder if Paul McCartney was bisexual. Actually, now I don't, partly on the strength of this interview. If Paul has a trope that led him to write these lyrics, I would say he likes making fun of his own homebody-ness. Anyway, back to my half-baked theory, now discredited, I think.

There’s not much evidence, but I think it could be true. Consider that in Prick Up Your Ears, the Beatle picking up gay playwright Joe Orton to discuss another Beatle movie screenplay is McCartney.

Consider also the lyrics:

“Jet”: “And Jet, I thought the major was a lady suffragette.”

“Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”:

Happy ever after in the market place
Molly lets the children lend a hand
Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face
And in the evening she's a singer with the band

Or “Get Back”:

Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a woman
But she was another man.
All the girls around her say she's got it coming
But she gets it while she can.

They keep explaining these as mistakes. Well, Mr McCartney sings this soi disant mistake over two lines; more than a mere substitution. Also note the matching of the pronoun: Desmond does his pretty face.

Perhaps Mr McCartney simply enjoys sexual confusion as a comedic gambit: he’d be hardly alone. People like casting Lennon as the adventurous one but there are good reasons against that. Lennon grew up without a father or other male role model. McCartney grew up with a musician dad and apparently learned a lot from him. The latter type tends to be more secure and more willing to experiment (or be seen as such). Lennon’s childhood would create a personality more likely to be hostile to bi- or homosexuality.

Again, no proof. And yes, I am open to charges of projection, I know. But I do wonder.

Edmund Burke on American Colonial History

All this was done by England whilst England pursued trade and forgot revenue. You not only acquired commerce, but you actually created the very objects of trade in America; and by that creation you raised the trade of this kingdom at least fourfold. America had the compensation of your capital, which made her bear her servitude. She had another compensation, which you are now going to take away from her. She had, except the commercial restraint, every characteristic mark of a free people in all her internal concerns. She had the image of the British Constitution. She had the substance. She was taxed by her own representatives. She chose most of her own magistrates. She paid them all. She had in effect the sole disposal of her own internal government. This whole state of commercial servitude and civil liberty, taken together, is certainly not perfect freedom; but comparing it with the ordinary circumstances of human nature, it was an happy and a liberal condition.

— Edmund Burke, “Speech on American Taxation,” 19 April 1774.

A great speech. I am not a Burke partisan, but I admire his strategies. Burke is the great Humanist who formed the gentler side of Thomas Hobbes’ absolutism, noting in Reflections on the Revolution in France that Englishmen would rather die than exercise the right to hire and replace public officials.

This prediction was not quite… fulfilled, as you may have noted. From the same speech, he discusses George Grenville and the habits of office:

He was bred to the law, which is, in my opinion, one of the first and noblest of human sciences,—a science which does more to quicken and invigorate the understanding than all the other kinds of learning put together; but it is not apt, except in persons very happily born, to open and to liberalize the mind exactly in the same proportion. Passing from that study, he did not go very largely into the world, but plunged into business,—I mean into the business of office, and the limited and fixed methods and forms established there. Much knowledge is to be had, undoubtedly, in that line; and there is no knowledge which is not valuable. But it may be truly said, that men too much conversant in office are rarely minds of remarkable enlargement. Their habits of office are apt to give them a turn to think the substance of business not to be much more important than the forms in which it is conducted. These forms are adapted to ordinary occasions; and therefore persons who are nurtured in office do admirably well as long as things go on in their common order; but when the high-roads are broken up, and the waters out, when a new and troubled scene is opened, and the file affords no precedent, then it is that a greater knowledge of mankind, and a far more extensive comprehension of things is requisite, than ever office gave, or than office can ever give. Mr. Grenville thought better of the wisdom and power of human legislation than in truth it deserves. He conceived, and many conceived along with him, that the flourishing trade of this country was greatly owing to law and institution, and not quite so much to liberty; for but too many are apt to believe regulation to be commerce, and taxes to be revenue. Among regulations, that which stood first in reputation was his idol: I mean the Act of Navigation. He has often professed it to be so. The policy of that act is, I readily admit, in many respects well understood. But I do say, that, if the act be suffered to run the full length of its principle, and is not changed and modified according to the change of times and the fluctuation of circumstances, it must do great mischief, and frequently even defeat its own purpose.